"Between the illiberal left and the authoritarian right, it's doubtful that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can survive." I said that.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017) ("Believe in truth." "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle, The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights." Id. at 65. "Post-truth is pre-fascism." Id. at 71.).
Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "What emerges from Baker's experience is a complex, often touching deconstruction of public schooling in America: children swamped with overdue assignments, overwhelmed by the marvels and distractions of social media and educational technology, and staff who weary themselves trying to teach in step with an often outmoded or overly ambitious standard curriculum" And now America has a Secretary of Education who knows next to nothing about education . . . and absolutely nothing about public education.).
James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro: A Major Motion Picture Directed by Raoul Peck, from Text by James Baldwin, compiled and edited by Raoul Peck (New York: Vintage International/ Vintage Books, 2017) ("It comes to a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you." Id. at 23.).
Pierre Briant, The First European: A History of Alexander in the Age of Empire, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Thinkers of the European Enlightenment, searching for ancient models to understand contemporary airs, were the first to critically interpret Alexander's achievements. As Pierre Briant shows, in the mind of eighteenth-century intellectuals and philosophes, Alexander was the first European: a successful creator of empire who opened the door to new sources of trade and scientific knowledge, and an enlightened leader who brought the fruits of Western civilization to an oppressed and backward 'Orient." From the text: "In the long term, Europe turned to 'the first European conqueror of the Orient' for the inspiration to carry out its own imperial history and/or to give meaning to various national histories (the debates surrounding German unity and on the future of liberated Greece), approaching Alexander in a manner sometimes arrogant, sometimes anxious, but always fascinated. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the first part of the twentieth century, many of those who analyzed and participated in empires looked to the history of Alexander to discover 'lessons of colonization', they searched the distant Macedonian past for the principles and methods that could help them to resolve the contradictions between unity and diversity, between empire and nations, and between the affirmed history of Europe and the subordinate histories of the subjects of empire." Id. at 345.-346.).
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 4th ed., with forewords by Andrew Hurrell and Stanley Hoffman (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1977, 2002) (From the back cover: "In this fundamental get, Hedley Bull explores three key questions: What is the nature of order in world politics? How is it maintained within the contemporary states system? And do desirable and feasible alternatives to the state system exist? Contrary to common claims, Bull asserts that the sovereign state systems is not in decline. It persists and thrives because it is essential to maintaining an international world order" QUERY: Is such still true as we move toward the close of the second decade of the twenty-first century? It is still true in the age of the Islamic State or multinational corporations such as ExxonMobil an Apple? From the Text: "[I]t has been contended that order in world politics conflicts with goals of justice--international, human and cosmopolitan--and that while there is a sense in which order is prior to justice, it does not follow from this that goals of order are to be given priority over goals of justice in any particular case. It was argued that a study of order in world politics, such a the present one, needs to be complemented by a study of justice. To make recommendations on the basis of an examination of human goals as incomplete as that provide in the present study would be unwarranted." Id. at 308. QUERY: Why isn't justice covered more in law school? Law and order are covered, but not justice.).
Jonathan Chait, Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy that Will Prevail (New York: Custom House/HarperCollins, 2017) ("The truth is that, even in its most erudite forms, conservatism was never the haven of race-blind idealism its adherents liked to imagine. (Even the sainted [William F.] Buckley, who supposedly cleansed the movement of ugly bigotry, had endorsed segregation, and then, quarter century after it was outlawed in the American South, defended apartheid in South Africa.) Trump's astonishing success in the Republican primaries blew to smithereens decades of conservative self-delusion. Here was a demagogue whose appeal barely intersected with the right's abstract ideas about the role of the state. Rather than attack government for being unworkable or too large and proposing to shrink it, as good Reagan Republicans customarily do, he attacked it for being allegedly run by morons and promised to solve all problems by having it be run by his own great business genius. Trump promised to protect every cent of Social Security and Medicare. He cravenly exploited the bigotry of the Republican electorate,even mocking their gullibility. ('I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenues and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters,' he boasted at one point.) Trump's appeal stripped away the illusion about just what made so many Americans pull the Republican lever for so long. 'If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support,' editorialized National Review in January 2016, well before Trump's nomination seemed inevitable, 'what would that say about conservatives?' Brett Stephens lamented in the Wall Street Journal, 'It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years.' By conservative' own logic, Trump's nomination proved exactly that." Id. at 233-234. "Trump revealed how little the party base cares about governing philosophy--Trump's crude attacks on Obama, even though they were rooted in an absurd conspiracy theory, or perhaps exactly for this reason, were enough to establish his tribal loyalties. The revulsion of Obama by the party base was a racialized backlash, rooted more in the president's identity than his policies, and despite the hand-wringing of his centric critics, no different set of policies could have avoid it." Id. at 234.).
Eliot A. Cohen, The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force (New York: Basic Books, 2016) (From the bookjacket: Cohen "argues that hard power remains essential for American foreign policy. While acknowledging that the United States must be careful about why, when, and how it uses forces, he insists that its international role is as critical as ever, and armed force is vital to that role." "Cohen explains that American leaders must learn to use hard power in new ways and for new circumstances. The rise of a well-armed China, Russia's conquest of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, and the spread of radical Islamist movements like ISIS are some of the key threats to global peace. If the United States relinquishes its position as a strong but prudent military power, and fails to accept its role as at the guardian of a stable world order, we run the risk of unleashing disorder, violence and tyranny on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The United States is still, as Madeline Albright once dubbed it, 'the indispensable nation.'" QUERY: Can the United States maintain the position and role Cohen advocates, while at the same time advocating, as does Trump, an "America First" stance? It is not a coincident that Cohen references the 1930s, a time in United States history when America first was strongly advocated by many, when he gives his warning: "we run the risk of unleashing disorder, violence and tyranny on a scale not seen since the 1930s.").
Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2012) ("Exxon's size and the nature of its business model meant that it functioned as a corporate state within the American state. Likes its forebears, Standard, Exxon proved across decades that it was one of the most powerful businesses ever produced by American capitalism. From the 1950s through the end of the cold war, Exxon ranked year after year as one of the country's very largest and most profitable corporations, always in the top five of the annual Fortune 500 lists. Its profit performance proved far more consistent and durable than that of other great corporate behemoths of America's postwar boom, such as General Motors, United States Steel, and I.B.M. In 1959, Exxon ranked as the second-largest American corporation by revenue and profit; four decades later it was third. And more than any of its corporate peers, Exxon's trajectory now pointed straight up. The corporation's revenues would grow fourfold during the two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its profits would smash all American records." As it expanded, Exxon refined its own foreign, security, and economic policies. In some of the faraway countries where it did business, because of the scale of its investments, Exxon's sway over local politics and security was greater than that of the United States embassy. In impoverished African countries increasingly important to Exxon's strategy, such as Chad, the weight of the corporation's investment and the cash flow it shared with local governments overwhelmed the economy and became the central prize in violent local contests for power. In Moscow and Beijing, Exxon's independent power and negotiating agendas competed with and sometimes attracted more attention than the demarches issued by American secretaries of state. Yet the corporation could also be insular and even passive in the faraway places where it acquired and produced oil and gas. It fenced off its local operations and separated its workforce from upheaval outside its gates. If its oil flowed and its contract terms remained intact, then Exxon often followed a directive of minimal interference in local politics, especially if those policies were controversial, as in the case of the African dictatorships with which the corporation partnered, or the countries, such as Indonesia and Venezuela, where civil conflict swirled around Exxon properties. In Washington, Exxon was a more confident and explicit political actor. The corporation's lobbyists bent and shaped American foreign policy, as well as economic, climate, chemical, and environmental regulations. Exxon maintained all-weather alliances with sympathetic American politicians while calling as little attention to its influence as possible." Id. at 19-20. "'You have to be willing to say, "No, We aren't going to do it that way, we are going to do it this way; if we can't do it this way, we won't be here,"' Tillerson explained, speaking specifically about ExxonMobil's strategy in the Niger Delta. 'This is the way my company has operated throughout the world throughout my entire career. We will walk away if we don't have an acceptable situation on the ground. That doesn't mean it's not tough, it does't mean we don't have problems. We managed, but it can be done in a way that the local community benefits tremendously--and the Akwa Ibom state has benefited enormously. That is why we enjoy good relations.'" Id. at 467. So says Rex Tillerson, now Trump's Secretary of State.).
Peter Dauvergne, Environmentalism of the Rich (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: MIT Press, 2016) (from the book jacket: "Over the last fifty years, environmentalism has emerged as a clear counterforce to the environmental destruction caused by industrialization, colonialism, and globalization. Activists and policymakers have fought hard to make earth a better place to live. But has the environmental movement actually brought about meaningful progress toward global sustainability? Signs of global 'unsustainability' are everywhere, from decreasing biodiversity to scarcity of fresh water to steadily rising greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, . . . the environmental movement is increasingly dominated by the environmentalism of the rich--diverted into eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation, energy efficacy, and recycling. While it's good that, for example, Barbie dolls' packaging no longer depletes Indonesian rainforests, and the Toyota Highlanders are available as hybrids, none of this gets at the source of the current sustainability crisis. More eco-products can just mean more corporate profits, consumption, and waste." "Dauvergne examines extraction booms that leave developing countries poor and environmentally depleted--with the ruination of the South Pacific Island of Nauru a case in point; the struggles against consumption inequities of courageous activists like Bruno Manser, who worked with indigenous people to try to save the rainforests of Borneo and the manufacturing of vast markers for nondurable goods--for example, convincing parents in China that disposable diapers made for healthier and smarter babies." Dauvergne reveals why a global political economy of ever more--more growth, more sales, more consumption--is swamping environmental gains. Environmentalism of the rich does little to bring about the sweeping institutional change necessary to make progress toward global sustainability.").
Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook, foreword by Nathaniel Rich (New York: Knopf, 2017) (From Nathaniel Rich's "Foreword": "How could the hidebound South, with its perpetual disintegration and defiant decadence, at the same time represent the future? Didion admits the idea seems oxymoronic, but she is onto something. Part of the answer, she suspects lies in the bluntness with which Southerners confront race, class, and heritage. . . In the South such distinctions are visible, rigid, and the subject of frank conversation [Note, however, how they get bent out of shape if one calls them "racist", then their blunt talk get aggressively defensive.] . . . . Everyone in the South knows where they stand. There is no shame in discussing it. It is suspicious, in fact, to avoid the subject." "The kind of thinking seemed retrograde in the seventies. From the vantage of New York, California, even New Orleans, it still seems so today. But this southern frame of mind annexed territory in the last four decades, expanding across the Mason-Dixon Line into the rest of rural America. It has taken root among people--or at least registered votes--nostalgic for a more orderly past in which the men concentrated on hunting and fishing and the worm on 'their cooking, their canning, their "prettifying" '; when graft as a way of life was accepted, particularly in politics, and segregation was unquestioned; when a white supremacist running for public office was 'a totally explicable phenomenon'; when a wife knew better than to travel through strange territory with a bikini and without a wedding ring." Id. at xvi-xviii. Yes, the "Southern-ification" of America, with its longing for a perverse history where everyone is locked into place by class, gender, and race, is at the heart of Trump's Make-America-Great-Again" America. It may play well in the short-term, but it the long-term Trump and his policies are on the wrong side of history. That is, if America survives, which it may not.).
Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises: A Novel (New York: Friar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) (From the book jacket: "From . . . Margaret Drabble comes a vital and audacious tale about the many ways in which we confront aging and living in a time of geopolitical rupture." "Though the Dark Flood Rises delivers the pleasures of a traditional novel, it is clearly situated in the precarious present. Margaret Drabble's latest enthralls, entertains, and asks existential questions in equal measure. Atlas, there is undeniable truth in Fran's insight: 'Old age, it's a fucking disaster!'").
Jean Dreze & Amaryta Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("However, the achievement of high growth--even high levels of sustainable growth--must ultimately be judged in terms of the impact of that economic growth on the lives and freedoms of the people. Over this period of rapid growth, while some people, particularly among the privileged classes, have done very well, many more continue to lead unnecessarily deprived and precarious lives. It is not that their living conditions have not improved at all, but the pace of improvement has been very slow for the bulk of the people, and for some there has been remarkably little change. While India has climbed rapidly up the ladder of economic growth rates, it has fallen relatively behind in the scale of social indicators of living standards, even compared with many countries India has been overtaking in terms of economic growth. [] The history of world development offers few other examples, if any, of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of reducing human deprivations." "A huge part of the current discontent in the Indian media has been concerned with the bad new that India's rate of GDP growth has slipped over the last couple of years. The fact that India's high growth rate has fallen certainly deserves serious attention, even though such slowing has happened in the same period across the world . . . and even through India's new GDP of 5 or 6 per cent per year still places it among the world's fastest-growing economies. [] What is remarkable is not the media's interest in growth rates, but its near-silence about the fact that the growth process is so biased, making the country look more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa." Id. at viii-ix. QUERY: Is not America becoming various islands of economic and social privilege in a sea of economic decline and social stagnation?).
Carter J. Eckert, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866-1945 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "For South Koreans, the twenty years from the early 1960s to the late 1970s were the best and worst of times--a period of unprecedented economic growth and of political oppression that deepened as prosperity spread. In this masterly account, Carter J.. Eckert finds the roots of South Korea's dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the country's long history of militarization--a history personified by South Korea's paramount leader, Park Chung Hee." "The first volume of a comprehensive two-part history, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866-1945 reveals how the foundations of the dynamic but strongly authoritarian Korean state that emerged under Park were laid during the period of Japanese occupation. As a cadet in the Manchurian Military Academy, Park and his fellow officers absorbed the Imperial Japanese Army's ethos of victory at all costs and absolutely obedience to authority. Japanese military culture decisively shaped Korea's postwar generation of military leaders When Park seized power in an army coup in 1961, he brought this training and mentality to bear on the project of Korean modernization." "Korean society under Park exuded a distinctly marital character, Eckert shows. Its hallmarks included the belief that the army should intervene in politics in times of crisis; that a central authority should plan and monitor the country's economic system; that the Korean people's 'can do' spirit would allow them to overcome any challenge; and that the state should maintain a strong disciplinary presence in society, reserving the right to use violence to maintain order." Perhaps this is a cautionary tale for America in 2017, especially that last part about "strong disciplinary presence" and "use [of] violence to maintain order".).
Richard Francis, Crane Pond: A Novel of Salem (New York: Europa Editions, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Usually told from the perspective of the victims, the Salem Witch Trials are a forever story. The vestiges of American social hysteria remain with us even today. In Crane Pond, Richard Francis reveals a side of the history that is not often recounted, as he skillfully constructs a portrait of Samuel Sewall, the only judge to later admit that a terrible mistake had been made.").
Glenn Frankel, High Noon: The Hollywood Blackest and the Making of an American Classic (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017) ("On the Fourth of July 1953--an ironic date, as he couldn't help but note--Carl and Estelle received a special delivery letter form the U. S. Embassy ordering him to report the next day and take along their passports. Carl went in as ordered, but he left the passports at home.The officer on duty told him the documents were no longer valid. If Carl and Estelle tried to use them to travel anywhere except back to the United States, they would be breaking the law." "Carl and Estelle were among thousands of alleged radicals who were either denied passports or had their travel documents confiscated during the Red Scare era. Announcing the policy in May 1952, then Secretary of State Dean Acheson stated that the department had decided to deny a passport to anyone whom there was 'reason to believe' was in the Communist party, or any one whose 'conduct abroad is likely to be contrary to the best interest of the United States,' or anyone who would be going abroad to engage inactivities which will advance the Communist movement.' It was a sweeping laundry list of 'anyone who's' that included teachers, trade unionists, lawyers, journalists, writers, and performers, ranging from historian W. E. B. Du Bois to singer Paul Robeson to novelist Howard Fast to members of the Hollywood Ten. A Board of Passport Appeals was established to hear cases but only if the applicant first signed an affidavit denying past or present membership in the Communist party. The panel relied on confidential information from the FBI and other sources that it routinely refused to disclose to the applicant." Id. at 269-270.).
A. C. Grayling, The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2016) (The modern mind is under threat in the twentieth-first century. "[T]he active reassertion of the old stories and beliefs is under way in parts of the world where they never fully or even partially lost their hold. The reasserts are happy to use the technologies that the new mind has created in order to reassert the old mind's domination: terrorists use anti-aircraft missiles and mobile phones to communicate with each other, inventions from a world that repudiated their vision of the world four centuries ago. Thus it is in a bottleneck of contradiction, a moment of peril, as the new mind outstrips the old mind so far that the old mind is trying to pull the new back, even trying to extirpate it, yet using its discoveries in a severity of self-contraction that approaches madness." "The solution? It is what it has always been, though it has never been as successfully applied as it might be. The solution is education. What a cliche that seems; yet like most cliches it is so deeply true that we cease to see its truth. Scarcely anywhere do we really educate. The time, technique, cost and commitment it would take really to educate are applied in very few places--only in the most elite and expensive schools, and in the graduate departments of the world's top universities, hardly scratching the surface in world-population terms. It is not the fault of dedicated teachers at schools around the world--teachers are among the most important people on the planet, given what they can do in the way of inspiring and enlightening when they are really good at it, and are given the tools and opportunities to do it--but they rarely have enough of either. As the world moves forward in some respects, dragged sideways or back by the conflicts between the old mind and the new in other respects, a type and quantity of education scarcely different from fifty or a hundred years ago continues to let the majority slip further behind." Id. at 323-324. We in the West should not be smug, as so few of us 'are really educated.' Highly degreed, but poorly educated. Food for thought.).
Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2017) ("For its part, the United States remains the most powerful entity in the world, but its share of global power is shrinking, as is its ability to translate the considerable power it does have into influence, trends that reflect internal political, social, demographic, cultural, and economic developments within the United States as well as shifts in the outside world. The result is a world in which centrifugal forces are gaining the upper hand." Id. at 11-12.).
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Press, 2017) ("The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterland, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. Many were arguing that smaller units made more sense, but others argued that smaller units could not defend themselves." "Reading the news at that time one was tempted to conclude that the nation was like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some on disintegration, and that this person with multiple personalities was furthermore a person whose skin appeared to be dissolving as they swam in soup full of other people whose skins were likewise dissolving, " Id. at 158.).
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper, 2017) ("This obsession with growth might appear self-evident, but only because we live in the modern world. It wasn't like this is the past. Indian maharajas, Ottoman sultans, Kamakura shogun and Han emperors rarely staked their political fortunes on ensuring economic growth. That Modi, Erdogan, Abe and Chinese president Xi Jinping all bet there careers on economic growth testifies to the almost religious status growth has managed to acquire throughout the world. Indeed, it may not be wrong to call the belief in economic growth a religion, because it now purports to solve may, if not most, of our ethical dilemmas. Since economic growth is allegedly the source of all good things, it encourages people to bury their ethical disagreements and adopt whichever course of action maximises long-term growth. Thus Modi's India is home to thousands of sects, parties, movements and gurus, yet through their ultimate aims differ, they all have to pass through the same bottleneck of economic growth, so why not pull together in the meantime?" "The credo of 'more stuff' accordingly urges individuals, firms and governments to disregard anything that might hamper economic growth, such as preserving social equality, ensuring ecological harmony or honouring one's parents." Id. at 208-209. "In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution created a huge urban proletariat, and socialism spread because no other creed managed to answer the unprecedented needs, hoes and fears this now working-class. Liberalism eventually defeated socialism only by adopting the best parts of the socialist program. In the twenty-first century we might witness the creation of a massive new unworkingclass: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value. who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society. This 'useless class' will to merely be unemployed--it will be unemployable." Id. at 330. Query: Might this "unworkingclass"--which will be most of us--consists of, on the one hand, mindless Paris Hilton wannabes and, on the other hand, spaced out, deadbeat dads? Both, I might add, highly medicated.).
Marcel Henaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Cultural Memory in the Present), translated from the French by Jean-Louis Morhange with the collaboration of Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 2010) ("How are we to understand the phrase 'the price of truth'? It ought to be enough to say that we should understand it literally. This means that were are not employing the usual metaphorical sense of the phrase, which refers to the moral cost of the effort or renunciation required to proclaim, discover, or confess the truth." "Whether the question of truth concerns self-discovery--either in a spiritual journey or through a technique of self-awareness--a search for knowledge--as in the natural or experimental science--or finally, an investigation to establish the facts--as in a legal procedure--it always involves an aspect of reality that is either misunderstood, difficult to grasp, or obscured by some form of resistance or refusal that needs to be overcome. In this case the 'price' of truth designates the honesty or courage required to proclaim or recognize proven facts; in other words, to refuse to lie, whether it be in research, a confession, or an investigation. It is a spiritual price, a symbolic price." Id. at 5-6.).
James Kirchick, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket:"Once the world's bastion of liberal, democratic values, Europe is now having to confront demons it thought it had laid to rest. The old pathologies of anti-Semitism, populist nationalism, and territorial aggression are threatening to tear the European postwar consensus apart. In riveting dispatches from this unfolding tragedy, James Kirchick shows us the shallow disingenuousness of the leaders who pushed for 'Brexit'; examines how a vast migrant wave is exacerbating tensions between Europeans and their Muslim minorities; explores the rising anti-Semitism that causes Jewish schools and synagogues in France and Germany to resemble armed bunkers; and describes how Russian imperial ambitions are destabilizing nations from Estonia to Ukraine. With a new American president threatening to abandon his country's traditional role as upholder of the liberal world order and guarantor of the continent's security [that is, with Trump abdicating America's role as 'leader of the free world,' and Trump's embracing his role as Putin's puppet], Europe may be alone in dealing with these unprecedented challenges. Based on extensive firsthand reporting, this book is a provocative look at a contentment in crisis." From the text: ""Europe's manifold crisis collectively represents a crisis of liberalism. As the memory of World War II, the Holocaust, and the gulag fades, so too does antipathy to the illiberal ideologies that spawned Europe's past horrors. This is evident in the rising electoral success of populist authoritarian parties of the extreme left and right, none of which have anything new to say yet claim the mantle of ideological innovation and moral virtue. During the Cold War, Western leaders offered a robust defense of their values in the face of an existential totalitarian challenge. Today, while the threats to freedom may be more diffuse, they are no less potent, and yet moral relativism and sell-doubt sap Western will at every turn. The consequences of such abdication are dire: If the values of America and Europe do not continue to shape the future as they have its recent past, then those of authoritarian powers like Russia will." Id. at 225. Let me suggest two things: First, perhaps Europe has already "ended"; that is, the Dark Age may already be here. Second, during the Cold War there was much talk of the "domino effect", if we lost (say) Vietnam to communism, then we would lose some other country, followed by yet another, and on and on. If so, if Europe ends, if Europe enters a dark age, so might go the United States. American democracy, as the 2016 election evidenced, is neither all that secure nor all that special.).
Sana Krasikov, The Patriots: A Novel (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2017).
Joshua Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA (Ne York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) ("Laos would be a dramatic innovation for the CIA, a transformative experience.The agency had never mounted a significant paramilitary operation before the secret war. let alone one as massive as the Laos operation would become. [] The Laos war would prove the dividing line for the CIA; afterward, the leadership would see paramilitary operations as an essential part of the agency's mission, and many other US policy makers would come to accept that the CIA was as much a part of waging war as the traditional branches of the armed forces." "Indeed, the experience that the CIA gained in paramilitary operations in Laos would serve the agency well, and in many other parts of the globe. [] The shift begun in Laos essentially culminated in the years after September 2001, when the CIA focused intensely on paramilitary operations. By the 2010s, the CIA oversaw targeted killings missions all over the world, ran proxy armies in Africa and Asia, and helped manage its own drone strike program designed to kill members of the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) and other part of the Middle East." Id. at 14-15.).
Sam Lebovic, Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) ("This book is the history of surprisingly wide-ranging attempts to clarify and expand the meaning of press freedom in the twentieth century. These efforts are largely forgotten today, because they were almost entirely unsuccessful. The idea of a positive right to the news never found firm footing in American law, politics, or culture. Press freedom still means only the right to speak without government interference. But understanding why that notion of press freedom seemed inadequate in the past offers new insight into the tangled relationships between the press, the First Amendment, and liberal democracy in America's twentieth century." Id. at 2. "In fact, the proliferation of media channels has coincided with a steep decline in reporting. Between 2006 and 2009, daily newspapers cut their editorial spending by more than a quarter; by 2011, newsrooms employment had fallen 25 percent form 2006 levels. . . ." "What is often called the death of the daily newspaper should more accurately be called the death of the reportorial labor. Id. at 230.).
Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) ("After more than 225 years, the fundamental questions posed and probed by the French Revolution remain at the heart of al democratic political life everywhere. Is the quest for equality inimical to liberty or is a measure of social equality the precondition for genuine freedom? Are healthy societies best created by interventionist governments acting for what they see as the public good or by freeing people's entrepreneurial urges? The French Revolution was never 'over'. Its achievements and triumph--like its deceptions and atrocities--were of a scale that has made its stature unique. Its reverberations were felt across the globe after 1789--and they live with us still." Id. at 390.).
Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) (From the bookjacket: "How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatred that seem inescapable in our close-knit world--from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankay Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present." "He shows that as the world became modern, those who were unable to enjoy its promises--of freedom, stability, and prosperity--were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. The many who came late to this new world--or were left, or pushed, behind--reacted in horrifying similar ways: with intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, and self-empowerment through spectacular violence. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the nineteenth century arose--angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinist in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally." "Today, just as then, the wide embrace of mass politics and technology and the pursuit of wealth and individualism have cast many more billions adrift in a demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity--with the same terrible results.").
Joel Mokyr, Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "During he late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. [W]hat remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today's unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, . . . economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development. Bringing together economics, the history of science and technology, and models of cultural evolution, Mokyr demonstrates that culture--the beliefs, values, and preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior--was a deciding factor in social transformation." "Mokyr looks at the period 1500-1700 to show that a politically fragmented Europe fostered a competitive 'market for ideas' and a willingness investigate the secrets of nature. At the same time, a transnational community of brilliant thinkers known as the 'Republic of Letters' freely circulated and distributed idea and writings. This political fragmentation and the supportive intellectual environment explains how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe but not in China, despite similar levels of technology ad intellectual activity. In Europe, heterodox and creative thinkers could find sanctuary in other countries and spread their thinking across borders, In contrast, China's version of the enlightenment remained controlled by the ruling elite." From the text: "[I]t is important to distinguish between such terms as 'culture' and institutions.' For my purposes it seems best to regard culture as something entirely of the mind, which can differ form individual to individual and is, to an extent, a matter of individual choice, Institutions are socially determined conditional incentives and consequences to actions, These incentives are parametrically given to every individual and are beyond their control, In that way institutions produce the incentive structure in a society." Id. at 9. "Culture . . . helps determine what kind of institutions emerge, but it does not guarantee outcomes." Id. at 11. "The success of cultural entrepreneurs depends on an environment that is conducive to intellectual innovation. Like all evolutionary systems, cultural systems resist change. If institutions are extremely conservative and conformist, and have the power to repress innovators by branding them as blasphemers and apostates, the risk to which cultural entrepreneurs and their followers are exposed i s higher and the likelihood of their success is reduced, Such institutions therefore discourage cultural entrepreneurship, The main reason for the resistance is quite clear, The new ideas proposed by a cultural entrepreneur replace incumbent ideas, and the social and economic rents accruing to those invested in a dominant set of ideas imply that there will be strong incentives for entrenched interests to discredit them or even using force to surprise them." Id. at 64-65. QUERY: Is the embrace of Trump's retrograde (and fraudulent) promise to 'Make America Great Again' an instance of trying to shutdown cultural entrepreneurs who are questioning the old culture? Black Lives Matter challenges cultural and institutional racism. 'Climate Change' scientists and environmentalists challenge 'old' manufacturing, 'old' economies, and short-term business thinking. Multiculturalists and globalists challenge cultural nationalists, parochialists and tribalists. Forward-looking cultural entrepreneurs being silenced by old, decrepit, dying, but mainly, backward looking anti-entrepreneurs. Is it not appropriate that the so-called business man president neither build nor manufactures, only places his brand on things that others build and manufacture.).
David A. Moss, Democracy: A Case Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2017).
Yascha Mounk, Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany (New York: Farrar, Srruas & Giroux, 2014).
Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (New York: Knopf, 2015)(Not everyone was convinced by this fledgling partnership [between George W. Bush and Putin]. 'I can understand the strategy of rapport, but it went too far,'Michael McFaul, an American academic who first met Putin in Petersburg before the collapse of the Soviet Union, told a newspaper. 'In think there is plenty good reason not to trust President Putin. This is a man who was trained to lie.'" Id. at 206.).
Joyce Carol Oates, A Book of American Martyrs: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Oates tells the story of two different and yet intimately linked American families. Luther Dunphy is a zealous evangelical who envisions himself as acting out God's will when he assassinates an abortion provider in his small Ohio town, while Augustus Voorhees, the idealistic but self-regarding doctor who is killed, leaves behind a wife and children scarred and embittered by grief.").
Hariton Pushwagner, Soft City, introduction by Chris Ware, afterword by Martin Herbert (New York: New York Review Comics, 2008, 2016).
Karate Reiter, 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) ("Meanwhile, prison staffers have almost as much trouble distinguishing mad from bad prisoners as dangerous from benign ones. Even psychologists working in SHUs and other isolation units struggle to distinguish everyday misbehavior from real mental illness. Again and again, these mental health professionals ask whether excrement-smearing, self-mutilation, suicidal prisoners are manipulative and in need of tough love, or sick and in need of care. Some observers have argued that prisoners hurt themselves deliberately, to obtain more comfortable quarters. These observers fail to ask: what kinds of situation makes a supposedly sane person miserable enough to smear feces all over himself, climb into a noose, or swallow a razorblades?" Id. at 165.).
Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (From the boo jacket: "Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracking the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the sweep of human history around the world." From the text: "Massive violence and human suffering were required to dispossess the rich and reduce the working population to an extent that left the survivors noticeably better off. Different forms of attrition at both the top and the bottom of the social spectrum converged in compressing the distribution of income and wealth. As we have seen in this and the previous three parts of this book, similar processes played out in every different environment and for a wide variety of reasons, from Bronze Age Greece to Japan in World War II, from England during the Black Death and Mexico in the throes of the Atlantic Exchange, to Mao's People's Republic. Spanning as they do much of recorded human history and several continents, what all these cases have in common is that substantial reductions in resource inequality depended on violent disasters. This raises two pressing questions: Has there been no other way to level inequality? And is there now?" Id. at 342. I think you will see that the answer is no, and no.).
Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (New York Knopf, 2017) ("The 1960 also saw the growth of the political community. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson praised 'the energy of the Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes--and of the Africans, and of the Polynesians' who would make America a new people and America a 'smelting pot' of cultures. But many Americans did not share Emerson's sentiments, and even in the 1840s nativists organized against the growing numbers of Irish and Germans immigrants in America. By the economic crises the 1870s, opinions turned against the Chinese, whom many saw as racially inferior, cultural different, and economically threatening. In 1882, for the first time in American history, Congress passed a law restricting immigration by race and nationality--the Chinese Exclusion Act. As economic insecurity persisted, this 'selective' approach to immigration grew more popular with nativists, who now opposed immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. In the early 1920s, Congress passed restrictive laws massively reducing the number of immigrants allowed into the country, setting up quotas based on national origins, and closing America to 'undesirable races.' In 1914, European immigration to the United States was over one million. By 1929, it had dropped to 158,000. The restrictive laws of ht early1920s virtually eliminated Asian immigration and severely reduced the number of southern and eastern Europeans. In 1914, more than 200,000 Italians came to the United States. After 1924, the yearly average was less than 15,000. In 1921, 95,000 Poles immigrated; the rest of the decade saw an average of 8,000. The result was that America became less and less of a 'nation of immigrants.' The number of foreign born living in America dropped from 13.1 percent in 1920 to 6.9 percent in 1950, eventually reaching a low of about 5 percent in the 1960s." Id. at 208-209. Are Americans in a 'nativists' frame of mind once again? I think so. Sad! Sick! (Also, see generally, Angus Deaton, "When the Rich Get Richer," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/26/2017.).
Ali Smith, Autumn: A Novel (New York: Pantheon, 201) (From the book jacket: Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means.").
Brad Snyder, The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism (New York & Oxford:Oxford U. Press, 2017) (Though I refer to the people associated with the House [of Truth] as 'liberals.' they were liberals not in the nineteenth-century sense of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on individual liberty,but in the twentieth-century sense of liberalism, with its emphasis on government. Like progressivism, 'liberalism' has many definitions. Progressives believed in government regulation: liberals also believed in government regulation, but they recognized government's limits. During the early twentieth century, the terms were sometimes used interchangeably. After World War I, however, the House of Truth crowd stopped referring to themselves as 'progressives' and began calling themselves 'liberals.' This may have been clever rebranding, but it also reflected growing and genuine concern over the abuse of government power and the potential of course, especially the Supreme Court, to protect civil liberties." "The network created by these men and women defined and then redefined American liberals. 'The word, liberalism, was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916-1918,' [Walter] Lippmann wrote in 1919. 'They wished to distinguish their own general aspirations in politics from those of the chronic partisans and the social revolutionists. They had no other bond of unity. They were not a political movement, There was no established body of doctrine. American liberalism is a phrase of the transition away from the old party system'." Id. at 3. Thoughtful readers might see historical roots of, connections to, overlaps with, similarities with, etc., many current legal, political, and social issues in America. For example, the government's attitude toward the Red Scares and the Red Summers of the late 1910s and early 1920s might trigger thoughts about the current administration's creation of, and proposed response to, alleged domestic threats of 'extreme Islamist terrorist.' During the period covered, the country was also in the throngs of varying degrees of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitism, anti-labor, etc, fevers. And, needless to say, anti-black and anti-color sentiments. "Though ti began to protect the rights of southern blacks to fair criminal trials in Moore v. Dempsey and black voting tights in Nixon v. Herndon, the Supreme Court circa 1927 was far from a panacea for people of color. That fall, Gong Lum, a Chinese grocer in Rosedale, Mississippi, challenged a school principal's decision to send his nine-year-old daughter, Martha, home from school after recess. Martha and other Chinese students in Mississippi attended Rosedale's white schools, through the state constitution mandated separate 'white or colored' schools. State officials ended the practice because Martha Lum 'was of Chinese descent, and not a member of the white or Caucasian race.' Lum argued that the school board had failed to set up a separate school for Chinese students and therefore must admit his daughter to the white school. The trial court agreed and ordered the school to readmit her. The state supreme court, however, reversed because the state constitutional provisions were designed 'to preserve the integrity and purity of the white race,' and Martha Lum was not white or Caucasian. The only options for her were to pay for private school or to attend the nearest public school for colored children" "The [U.S. Supreme] Count unanimously affirmed the state supreme court's decision based on the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson establishing the racially 'separate but equal doctrine,' as well as prior decision about racially segregated schools [] Holmes and Brandeis both joined Gong Lum v. Rice's unanimous reaffirmation of the separate but equal doctrine. [] Yet neither Frankfurter, Lippmann, nor any other white liberals associated with the House of Truth mentioned the outcome of Martha Lum's case." Id. at 475-476.).
Carol S. Steiker & Jordan M. Steiker, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2017) ("Executions are so rare that execution is not the leading cause of death on California's death row. Execution is not even the second leading cause of death there; it comes in third behind natural causes and suicide. The dysfunction in California is extreme but not unique. [] Nationwide, of the more than 8,000 inmates under a death sentence at some point between 1973 and 2013 only 16 percent have been executed. A much larger number, 42 percent, had their convictions or sentences overturned or commuted, and 6 percent died by other causes; the remaining 35 percent are on death row." Id. at 1-2.).
Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System (New York: Verso, 2016) ("The most straightforward theory of capitalist crisis in this book is offered by Randall Collins--a theory he correctly characterizes as a 'stripped-down version of [a] fundamental insight that Marx and Engels had formulated already in the 1840s'. That insight, as adapted by Collins, is that capitalism is subject to 'a long-term structural weakness', namely 'the technological displacement of labor by machinery'. . . ." "What exactly does this crisis consist of? While labour has gradually been replaced by technology for the past two hundred years, with the rise of information technology and, in the very near future, artificial intelligence, that process is currently reaching its apogee, in at least two respects: first, it has vastly accelerated, and second, having in the second half of the twentieth century destroyed the manual working class, it is now attacking and about to destroy the middle class as well--in other words, the new petty bourgeoisie that is the very carrier of the neocapitalist and neoliberal lifestyle of 'hard work and hard play', of the careerism-cum-consumerism, which . . . may indeed be considered the indispensable cultural foundation of contemporary capitalism's society. What Collins see coming is a rapid appropriation of programming, managerial, clerical, administrative, and educational work by machinery intelligent enough even to design and create new, more advanced machinery. Electronicization will do to the middle class what mechanization has done to the working class, and it will do it much faster. The result will be unemployment in the order of 50 to 70 per cent by the middle of the century, hitting those who had hoped, by way of expensive education and disciplines job performance (in return for stagnant or declining wages), to escape the threat of redundancy attendant on the working classes. The benefits, meanwhile, will go to 'a tiny capitalist class of robot owners' who will become immeasurably rich. The drawback for them is, however, that they will increasingly find that their product 'cannot be sold because too few persons have enough income to buy it. Extrapolating this underlying tendency'. Collins writes, 'Marx and Engels predicted the downfall of capitalism and its replacement with socialism', and this is what Collins also predicts." Id. at 9-10, citations omitted. From the book cover: "After years of ill health, capitalism's now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated." "In How Will Capitalism End?, . . . Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector's excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalization of the markets." "Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand." And, to make it worse, the United States find Trump and family in the White House. Repealing of Dodd-Frank, deregulating of energy sector, ignoring climate change and other environmental concerns, promising coal-related jobs that are never coming back, gutting public school education, promising, ignoring even the pretense of ethics, and so on and so forth, will hasten America's downward spiral. The end is near. It will not be pretty.).
Cass R. Sunstein, #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017).
Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, The Original Black Elite: Daniel Murray and the Story of a Forgotten Era (New York: Amistad/HarperColins, 2017) ("Most Americans take pride in the ideals embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution: respect for individual rights, opportunity to rise, equal protection under the law. These are values we honor, and if they were not equally applied to all creeds, colors, and genders the start, retake comfort in believing that the American master narrative is one of increasing freedoms over time. On the very day the author composed this section of the epilogue (July 1, 2016), she perused a local newspaper article that included the following sentence: 'In our struggle, we have always moved toward this idea of greater liberty.' The 'our' and 'we' referred to Americans collectively. That statement is false. The master narratives is not unidirectional. The single greatest reversal in our history was the disregard of black citizens' newly won rights when Reconstruction was peremptorily abandoned. Worse yet, here was a case where the Constitution spoke loud and clear but was discounted. Worst of all, though we tout our being--first and foremost--a nation of laws, violent crimes such as arson and lynching were ignored or even tacitly condoned. It is a part of our history many Americans do not want to hear about, much less own. Yet only by remembering, and determining respect the rights of all henceforth, can we redeem ourselves as a nation for shameful chapters in our past. Americans recognize, even as James Madison did, that slavery was 'a blot on our Republican character,' but too many think that prospects for African Americans grew continually from the day the Emancipation Proclamation was released, and if progress was slow, well, maybe blacks tended not to be go-getters, rather preferring to languish in the victim role. The historical reality reveals a temporary rise inserts followed by a disastrous suppression, forced by white supremacists and reinforced by government. Blame-the-victim characterizations of black struggles do not take into account the full historical evolution. Unrealized black advancement is America's problem, and our government and society are rightly tasked with fixing it. [] The America master narrative of increasing freedom can reverse direction at any time again." Id. at 410-411.).
Michael Tisserand, Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White (New York: Harper, 2016)("Still, the facts seem to be in. George Joseph Herriman was a black man born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles. For their own reasons, the Herrimans had obscured their identity and 'passed' for white. This made it possible for George Herriman to socialize easily with whites, to attend the family's chosen school, to work on the staff of Joseph Pulitzer's and William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, to marry his white wife, and to purchase property in the Hollywood Hills bound by a racial covenant that prohibited ownership to backs." Id. at 6.).
Melvin I. Urofsky, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015) (This book appears on a previous posting. It is included here, again, because in these troubled times judicial dissent will be frequent. One should have a historical perspective so as to realize that dissent is neither rare or exceptional.).
Laura Weinrib, The Taming of Free Speech: America's Civil Liberties Compromise (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) ("By the late 1930s, [Jersey City, New Jersey, mayor Frank] Hague's insistence that a 'real American' would never invoke the Bill of Rights sounded outdated, even unpatriotic. Dozens of prominent national organizations condemned his flagrant disregard for rule of law. Free speech advocates emphasized the similarities between Hague's autocratic practices and similar speech restrictions under Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Like Father Charles E. Coughlin and Huey Long, Boss Hague was emblematic of dangerous totalitarian tendencies within the United States. His oft-quoted pronouncement, 'I am the law,' was palpable evidence that fascism could happen at home, Indeed, the eminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr regarded 'Mayor Hague's defiance of our laws [a] one of he most flagrant piece of fascism in the modern day." Id. at 227, citations omitted. Query: Are we back here again?).
James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) ("On June 5, 1934, about a year and a half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the notorious anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. []The transcript reveals the startling fact that is my point of departure in this study: the meeting involved detailed and lengthy discussion of the law of the United States. In the opening minutes, Justice Minister Gurtner presented a memo on American race law, which had been carefully prepared by the officials of the ministry for purposes of the gathering; and the participants returned repeatedly to the American models of racist legislation in the course of their discussions. It is particularly starting to discover that the most radical Nazis present were the most ardent champions of the lessons that American approaches held for Germany. [] My purpose is to chronicle this neglected story of Nazi efforts to mine American race law for inspiration during the making of the Nuremberg Laws, and to ask what it tell us about Nazi Germany, about the modern history of racism, and especially about America," Id. at 1-2. "First of all, seems America through Nazi eyes brings home a truth that wise scholars have recognized, but that our general culture has so far been slow to grasp. The history of American racism is not just a history of the Jim Crow South. We must overcome the tendency to equate race law in America with the law of segregation; we must look beyond the 'mirror images' of Nazi Germany and the southern states. If we think of the history of race in America as the history of Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, of segregation and the heroics of the civil rights movements, we risk blinding ourselves to an immense expanse of what has taken place. European observers of the 1930s all recognized that black-white conflict was only one aspect of the history of American racism. Indeed, Nazis almost never mentioned the American treatment of blacks without also mentioning the American treatment of other groups, in particular Asians and Native Americans: To them what 'Nordic' America faced was not just the 'Negro problem,' but the problems of 'Mongols,' of Indians, of Filipinos, and of innumerable other non-'Nordic' groups trying to 'push their way in.' By the same token, America's influential stature in twentieth-century world racism had to do with wider American campaigns and other American forms of law than just segregation in the South. In particular, it had to do with national and nationwide programs of race-based immigration, race-based second-class citizenship, and race-based anti-miscegenation law. Those were the aspects of American law that appealed most to Nazi Germany, not Jim Crow segregation in the narrow sense," Id. at 137-138, citations omitted.).
James D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1981) (From the book jacket: "James D. Wilkinson examines for the first time the cultural impact of the anti-Fascist resistance in Europe and the search of intellectuals for renewal--for social change through moral endeavor--during World War II and its immediate aftermath." "It was a period of hope [] that revealed the intellectuals as heirs to the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment. Out of the shattering experience of war dvlivd a reaffirmation of faith in reason and believe in man." Query: Might, in this age of Trump, American intellectuals find inspiration for confronting the new American nationalism, post-truthism, post-factism, etc? If Trump can label the press "the enemy of the people" for reportage he does not like, how long will it be before intellectuals, educators, etc., will also be counted among such enemies?).
Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left, and Each Other (New York: Penguin Books, 1998) ("There are, any middle-class American believe, no alternatives to capitalism. But a form of capitalism that sets up individuals in situations of intense conflict with each other is corrosive of the ideal of society in which people are understood to share a common fate." Id. at 241.).
Franklin E. Zimring, When Police Kill (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) ("While the empirical research on killing by police in the United States is far from complete, there is substantial evidence now in support of three fundamental conclusions: First, police use of lethal force is a very serious national problem in the United States. As many as a thousand killing a year is neither an isolated phenomenon found in a few communities or departments nor the result of a small number of problem officers. Second, killing by police are a much larger problem in the United States than in any other developed nation, in large part because widespread ownership and use of handguns increases the vulnerability of police to life-threatening assault. Third, police killings are a very specific problem that can be effectively controlled without major changes in the performance or the effectiveness of police." "This is a serious problem we can fix. Clear administrative restrictions on when police shoot can eliminate 50 to 80 percent of killings by police without causing substantial risk to the lives of police officers or major changes in how police do their jobs. A thousand killing a year are not the unavoidable result of community conditions or of the nature of policing in the United States." Id. at xi-xii.).
